Warlord and the Waif by Chloe Parker

CHAPTER FIVE

ELLA

I’M STILL A little shell-shocked when the purple alien takes me out of the room, holding me tight by the arm. The big guy scared me, not that I would ever let him show it. But now that we’re out of the throne room, I let my knees shake, wobbling a bit as Portia guides me up the spiral staircase from earlier and down a long corridor.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, “Calder can be…forceful.”

“That’s an understatement,” I mutter, “Is he always like that?”

“For a long time, he has been,” she pats my arm, “But he wasn’t like that when we first met.”

“When was that?”

She chuckles.

“Five hundred years ago, give or take a couple decades.”

“Five hundred years?” I gape.

“Mmhm.”

We pass a row of wooden doors, and stop at one just like the others. Portia gestures at a symbol, then runs her hand over it.

“How do you spell your name?” she asks.

“E L L A,” I reply.

Another wave of her hand, and my name appears on the door in glowing text.

Cool trick.

“You open the doors by pressing your hand against the lock with two fingers and turning them to the right,” she shows me, and the door slides up and open. With another wave of her hand, it closes. “Try it.”

I mimic the motion, and she nods.

“Good,” she says, then gestures inside. “Now, let me show you your room.”

It isn’t anything fancy—about what I would expect from a medieval castle. A small, plain bed made up with a white fur blanket sits to my right, and a chair and mirror to my left, along with a small chest, not that I have any belongings. A single narrow window is set into the wall on the opposite side of the room, the city stretching out in the view beyond.

When I imagined what some advanced alien world might be like, I didn’t picture these costumes. Or the castle. Or the clockwork city.

Portia hands over a set of what looks like something straight off the set of Elizabeth Taylor’s Taming of the Shrew, not dissimilar to what she’s wearing. I always imagined sleek lines like the uniforms in Star Trek, not a throwback to the Renaissance. Wearing these kinds of clothes in a world where space travel, stasis pods, and a floating city exist baffles me. The dissonance of it sends me reeling once again, and I struggle to remember that this is real life.

Or maybe it isn’t.

Maybe I’m in San Francisco after all, on a bad trip that makes everyone look funny and the whole world seem like it’s upside down.

I start to get dressed, a little shy at first. Portia gives me all the space and time I need, though, and I distract myself with more questions.

“How do you live so long?” I ask.

“Elixir,” she says. Portia seems a lot more willing to answer questions. “Normally it costs a lot of money, but here on Myste we’re practically swimming in it. The vapors from the Elixir Mines on the surface are enough to keep us alive indefinitely.”

“Wait,” I stop her, “So as long as I’m here, I’m immortal?”

So not only am I abducted, but I’m immortal.

This is a lot to take in.

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she says. She gives me a teasing smirk when she sees me struggle with the laces on the bodice. “Do you need some help?”

I let out a sigh of frustration.

“Yes,” I admit, dropping my hands to my sides.

She chuckles and steps toward me, picking up the loose ends. The alien is taller than me, and built like a gymnast. She’s humanoid, like a lot of the other aliens I’ve seen, but her pupils are pointed like a cat’s floating in green irises, and she has a set of long tentacles instead of hair. She wears the same kind of clothes that I do, though I think hers suit her a little more than they do me.

“I need help with something else, too,” I mutter, afraid that someone might be listening. “Is there…is there any way for me to call Earth? Like some kind of interstellar payphone? Just to call my dad and tell him I’m okay.”

Portia gives me a pitying glance.

It was a stupid question.

“We’re millions of lightyears from Earth,” she says, shaking her head, “And besides, even if we could call…”

She trails off. That doesn’t seem good.

“What’s wrong?”

She ignores me and continues lacing up the bodice, and I release a puff of air when she cinches the laces tight. My boobs press up toward my collarbone and I blink at the tension around my ribs.

“Is that really necessary?” I ask.

“Around here, we do what m’lord says,” she replies, and I think I catch a hint of sarcasm in her tone. “Calder will not be happy if you aren’t dressed in our customary garb.”

“It looks like something you’d wear to a Renaissance festival,” I huff.

Portia cocks her head to the side, her tentacles twitching curiously.

“I don’t know what that means, but I look forward to hearing all about your Earth festivals,” she says. “Now, follow me. I’m sure you’re hungry after your long journey.”

She turns and strides out of the room, and I follow.

“Wait,” I urge her, and she slows to look over her shoulder, “What were you going to say about calling my dad?”

She gives me that same pitying look.

“Lucien wasn’t lying when he said you had lots of questions,” she tuts, shaking her head with a bitter smile. “Let’s get you some food, and then we can discuss.”

As long as someone is finally going to give me more answers, I guess I can wait.

We make our way down a stone hallway, back the way we came, and toward a set of service stairs. The passage looks like something you might see in an old ruin, but it’s in pristine condition and lit by glowing orbs of golden light floating in midair. I’m puzzled by what seems like a mixture of science and magic that dominates this place.

We descend the stairs into a massive kitchen carved in stone and decked out with a whole set of high tech cooking gear. The decor is archaic, but the accessories are high-tech, just like the rest of the castle. Portia waves her hand across a big stone tablet in the middle of the room and a holograph appears in front of her, where she gestures before a light appears underneath the tablet’s crystalline surface.

I guess it’s a stove but, just like everything else here, it looks more like something out of Star Trek.

“Take a seat,” she says, gesturing at a small wooden table in the corner, “I’ll get started on a meal for you.”

I sit, watching Portia work. She places a flat silver bowl on top of the stone counter and it floats just slightly above it, where she fills it with water and some kind of grain. My eyes go wide when she throws a live shellfish into the bowl, where it dissolves with a puff of pink liquid.

I decide right then and there that I’m not going to eat that.

But it does smell awfully good, like scallops and garlic.

“What are you making?” I ask.

She says some incomprehensible word, complete with clicks and a kind of purring sound, and then she smiles.

“It’s a kind of stew,” she says, “Vegetarian, if that’s your concern.”

“But it looked like you just put something alive in there.”

“That was a carnivorous plant,” she explains, “Not sentient, but vicious all the same. There are a lot of things like that down on the surface.”

“What’s down there other than the mines?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says, “Not anymore. We took care of that a long time ago.”

Everything they say raises more questions.

She returns to the stove and takes a ladle to pour some of the stew into a wooden bowl, then passes it over to me. The meal is a light shade of pink now, with some green vegetable stirred into what resembles a hardy, long-grain rice. I’m still reeling from what she’s just told me, but my stomach growls loudly, so I take the proffered bowl and spoon. When I take a tentative bite, I find that it’s actually pretty good, a little spicy and a little sweet. It almost tastes like coconut. And I’m relieved to find that nothing inside is moving.

Portia watches me eat for a few minutes, crossing her arms and making no move to explain any more about what’s going on. I can’t be bothered to stop eating at first. I didn’t realize how cold I was, and the spicy broth energizes my aching limbs. I feel my strength starting to come back, even though I still can’t breathe in this damn corset. I take a break only to ask more questions.

“Finish what you were going to tell me,” I plead, “I need answers.”

Portia’s green eyes are full of regret as she takes a deep sigh.

“Even if we had a way of reaching your father, we couldn’t,” she begins.

“Why?”

She presses her lips together in discomfort.

“Because you’ve been in stasis for more than a hundred years.”

I go cold, dropping my rapidly emptying bowl to the table in front of me with a clatter.

“What?”

Portia paces toward me to sit down in the seat across from mine.

“The Hyperboreans maintain a strict protocol of waiting to release a subject from stasis until their average lifespan would come to an end,” she says gently, “For the sake of integration. It’s easier to sever ties when you don’t have any left.”

I lean back in my chair, holding on to the edges like I’m going to fall off.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“The Empire finds that integration is easier if you’ve lost your worldly connections.” She reaches out and takes my hand. “But I hope you know you’re not alone; all of us here have lived long enough to watch the people we love disappear.”

I jerk my hand away.

My dad is dead. My mom, too, even if we’d gotten more distant after the divorce.

My parents spent the rest of their lives thinking they’d lost their daughter, their only living child since my brother was killed.

There’s only one person I have to blame for this.

I stagger to my feet, and Portia jumps up to catch me.

“Where are you going?”

I turn to her with a glare, the rage clear on my face.

“I’m going to talk to the warden.”